Eades: Israeli Study Follow Up Lessons

Subjects were studied on one of three diets over a two-year period. One group went low-carb, another low-fat and a third group followed a Mediterranean diet. The original two-year study,
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0708681, published in 2008, clearly showed the obvious advantage of a low-carb diet. But, at the time, the media kept misrepresenting what the study really showed, so I corrected the record here:
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/weight-loss/low-carb-diet-trumps-low-fat-diet-yet-again
and here:
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/saturated-fat/follow-up-on-the-israeli-low-carb-study

After completion of the study, the researchers kept in touch with 95 percent of the subjects and were able to gather data from them four years after the end of the original two-year study.

What the researchers found is what you would expect if carbs really are more fattening. The low-carb dieters gained more weight after going off their low-carb diets than did the low-fat dieters after going off theirs.

The study gets really interesting when you start looking at what happens to lipid levels when people go off of either low-fat or a low-carb diets.

What the study found was that folks who improved their lipids on low carb but then stopped "low carbing" re-tained the benefits in their lipid profile for longer than did those who were doing low fat, even though they regained more weight than those who did low-fat, given that both quit dieting after the study.

The picture this paints is that even if you complete some periods of low carb, and then go back to eating SAD, there's a long term benefit; that picture is represented in other studies as well.  IOW, better to have short term success and then go back to bad ways than never to have success in managing your weight/health markers.

"Coach"

"The word "coach" comes from the word stagecoach, which was the major mode of transportation used by people before the automobile. Whether it was drawn by a horse of steam engine, the stagecoach took people from one place to another. The coach in athletics does the same thing - he or she is able to take people from where they are to where they want to be. This is the essence of what a coach truly is."
http://www.coachhoover.blogspot.com/

Wheat Free?

This is a very nicely done bit about why you want to ditch the wheat.  Short version - it's all bad, no good, pokes holes in your guy, spikes blood sugar, feeds harmful gut bacteria, breaks down into addictive opioid like compounds, and might be the cause of the end of the earth if the Mayans were right.  Or not.  But either way, try going wheat free for 3 weeks and see if you feel all the better for it in joint pain, overall inflammation, and perhaps even fat loss.

http://news.discovery.com/human/why-you-should-probably-stop-eating-whea
t-121214.html

Persistence

The new Cat!  15% weight loss, and dress size from 22 down to 12 - pretty damned awesome young lady!

To me Cat's story is about persistence.  I've known her for about five years, and she's always been working hard to be better, stronger, faster, fitter.  I answered a few specific questions for her about nutrition and diet and performance, but mostly, she just kept after it and asked help from many folks and now- WOW!  Well done.  There could not be a better example for success -
1.  Get started
2.  Never quit!
3.  Always learn and experiment to make make more progress.

Congrats to you and your team mates at CF Memphis and Wolf River CF!

That Stuff Will Kill You

 

Impressive, 41 grams of HFCS in a 12 ounce can of cola, who knew.

Your Brain On Ketones

"And now let's really get down to the mitochondrial level. Mitochondria are the power plants of our cells, where all the energy is produced (as ATP). Now, when I was taught about biochemical fuel-burning, I was taught that glucose was "clean" and ketones were "smokey." That glucose was clearly the preferred fuel for our muscles for exercise and definitely the key fuel for the brain. Except here's the dirty little secret about glucose - when you look at the amount of garbage leftover in the mitochondria, it is actually less efficient to make ATP from glucose than it is to make ATP from ketone bodies! A more efficient energy supply makes it easier to restore membranes in the brain to their normal states after a depolarizing electrical energy spike occurs, and means that energy is produced with fewer destructive free radicals leftover."
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201104/your-
brain-ketones?page=2

What is the significance of the above to you, dear reader?  Mainly that it is another indicator that a high fat, minimal carb diet which supports ketone production is healthy for the noodle.  As the author says:

"What does it all mean? Well, in the brain, energy is everything. The brain needs a great deal of energy to keep all those membrane potentials maintained - to keep pushing sodium out of the cells and pulling potassium into the cells. In fact, the brain, which is only 2% of our body weight, uses 20% of our oxygen and 10% of our glucose stores just to keep running. (Some cells in our brain are actually too small (or have tendrils that are too small) to accommodate mitochondria (the power plants). In those places, we must use glucose itself (via glycolysis) to create ATP.)

When we change the main fuel of the brain from glucose to ketones, we change amino acid handling. And that means we change the ratios of glutamate and GABA. The best responders to a ketogenic diet for epilepsy end up with the highest amount of GABA in the central nervous system.  One of the things the brain has to keep a tight rein on is the amount of glutamate hanging out in the synapse. Lots of glutamate in the synapse means brain injury, or seizures, or low level ongoing damaging excito-toxicity as you might see in depression. The brain is humming along, using energy like a madman. Even a little bit more efficient use of the energy makes it easier for the brain to pull the glutamate back into the cells. And that, my friends, is a good thing."

Eat meat, eggs and vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch and no sugar/wheat.

"The Best" Exercise

"Yet some of the best physical activities for your body don't require the gym or that you get fit enough to run a marathon. These "workouts" can do wonders for your health. They'll help keep your weight under control, improve your balance and range of motion, strengthen your bones, protect your joints, prevent bladder control problems, and even ward off memory loss.

"No matter your age or fitness level, these activities can help you get in shape and lower your risk for disease:

"Swimming. You might call swimming the perfect workout. The buoyancy of the water supports your body and takes the strain off painful joints so you can move them more fluidly. "Swimming is good for individuals with arthritis because it's less weight bearing," explains Dr. I-Min Lee, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Research finds that swimming can improve your mental state and put you in a better mood. Water aerobics is another option. These classes help you burn calories and tone up.
"

This is a cut from an email from the Harvard School of Medicine.

I would not be the one to discourage anyone from doing what they like, what they believe in, or what they want to like or believe in.  But swimming does not meet the criteria laid out above by the authors of this article.

As practiced by those who smoothly and easily glide along in the water, swimming does not:
-Help with weight control
-Improve your balance
-Improve range of motion (possible exception of the shoulders)
-Strengthen your bones
-"Protect" your joints

Swimming is NOT the perfect workout, and one could easily determine that by using the criteria above.

For the elderly, swimming low speed for long time durations is particularly lacking in strength building, bone stress (and therefore does not help with bone density), and range of motion for the lower body.  It is not going to help you get up of of the floor, and it WILL NOT help build the strength we all need in the torso to help us carry loads safely.

Swimming is by far better than doing nothing.  Sprinting for short, intense intervals is even better.  And swimming for intervals one day, and for endurance another day, in combination with a smart strength and conditioning program with barbells might be considered very complete.

Unfortunately, the "public health authorities" believe that we the consumer can only absorb simple messages with a simple premise and which does not require that we do much.  I can see why they think this way, but I recoil against pretending that not working very hard in the water is "the perfect exercise."  I hope my readers would strive for much more than that.

Eat Meat, Or Eat All Day

"At the core of this research is the understanding that the modern human  brain consumes 20 percent of the body's energy at rest, twice that of  other primates. Meat and cooked foods were needed to provide the  necessary calorie boost to feed a growing brain.    One study, published last month in the Proceedings of the National  Academy of Sciences, examined the brain size of several primates. For  the most part, larger bodies have larger brains across species. Yet  humans have exceptionally large, neuron-rich brains for our body size,  while gorillas - three times as massive as humans - have smaller brains with one-third the neurons. Why?"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/sorry-vegans-eatin
g-meat-and-cooking-food-is-how-humans-got-their-big-brains/2012/11/26/3d
4d36de-326d-11e2-bb9b-288a310849ee_story.html

This article is a great read, and I recommend it in its entirety.  It falls right in line with the excellent book Catching Fire, which details the process described in this article in much greater detail.  Another juicy cut:

"The answer, it seems, is the gorillas' raw, vegan diet (devoid of animal  protein), which requires hours upon hours of eating to provide enough  calories to support their mass.    Researchers from Brazil, led by Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a  neuroscientist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, calculated  that adding neurons to the primate brain comes at a fixed cost of  approximately six calories per billion neurons.    For gorillas to evolve a humanlike brain, they would need an additional  733 calories a day, which would require two more hours of feeding, the  authors wrote. A gorilla already spends as much as 80 percent of the  tropics' 12 hours of daylight eating.    Similarly, early humans eating only raw vegetation would have needed to  munch for more than nine hours a day to consume enough calories, the  researchers calculated. Thus, a raw, vegan diet would have been  unlikely, given the danger and other difficulties of gathering so much  food.    

"Cooking makes more foods edible year-round and releases more nutrients  and calories from both vegetables and meat, Herculano-Houzel said.    "The bottom line is, it is certainly possible to survive on an  exclusively raw diet in our modern day, but it was most likely  impossible to survive on an exclusively raw diet when our species  appeared.""

Indeed so - in fact, among those on a completely raw food diet, over one third become infertile.  However, for you men who would like to be rid of that pesky six drive, a raw vegan diet seems to do the trick nicely. 

Not Explainable

From an orphanage in India:
"The results have been tangible. We are a dominating force in statewide field hockey. Last week, our under-19 girls team placed second in a school-level national tournament.

"One young woman received a full college scholarship in hockey - the coaches marvel at her fitness. Vijay Raj placed 16th at the 2012 Asia Regional and is earning a living as a CrossFit trainer in Delhi.

"CrossFit has permeated our ashram and is an integral part of who we are. Where most Indians recount the glories of the national cricket team, our children seamlessly discuss Froning, Spealler, Khalipa and others . Through CrossFit, we are redefining the meaning of "orphan" from a place of pity, to strong, competent, confident young men and women."
http://community.crossfit.com/article/crossfit-sri-ram-ashram-raises-money-hospice

CrossFit is:
- Touted by elite warriors and first responders, NFL and former NFL players, NBA players, Motocross, skiers, and ultra-marathoners
- Touted by grandmothers with transformation in their physical capacity
- Touted by the addicted as a potent element of their recovery
- Giving pull-ups, rope climbs and significant strength gains to women in droves
- Provides a training ground for facing and overcoming internal obstacles - reading the stories of many, they say "I learned how to face my demons in CrossFit and it changed how I function at work and at home."
- Giving kids, and high schoolers, a type of fitness they value - even and possible especially those not previously inclined to athletic activity
- Giving all varieties of mid-aged athletes cause to say "I'm more fit than I ever have been"
- Proving effective for kids with severe disease states
- Giving a new persona to the children in an orphanage

How can this be possible?  So many different kinds of people, and all able to use CrossFit to address and transform in their lives.

I have been seeing and hearing this happen since 2007, and still marvel at the impact. CrossFit is a potent tool and continues to give utility from seemingly every angle.

I recommend you enjoy the full article above, it is fitting inspiration for this season.

"Strong Is The New Skinny"

"Jones says she's not surprised that more women are taking heavy weights seriously. "I made a t-shirt last summer that said, 'Strong is The New Skinny' and it resonated with so many women," she says. "Even women I didn't know on the streets or in airports stopped me to take a picture of the shirt. Women get the sentiment. Women are finally seeing that skinny does not mean strong. Actually, it's just the opposite in many cases."

"She may have a point. A few studies published this year show it's possible to be lean and metabolically unhealthy without exercise.  Similarly, overweight people can be metabolically fit on the inside, but still carry too much outer weight. Building inner muscle and aerobic capacity is key to truly improving health, regardless of what the scale says."

Read more:
http://healthland.time.com/2012/11/02/we-tried-this-strong-v-skinny/#ixz
z2EHTIpR3n

The author continues:
"I'm not totally sold on heavy weights just yet, but I will say that focusing on getting fit and being obsessed with burning calories makes working out much more fun."

In my experience, between women and men, gaining strength through the use of barbells or body weight movements does more for women than for men, due to the fact that women fear barbells and feel exuberant when they defeat their fears, and their mis-perceptions of the limits of their strength.  Men would much rather stand around and talk about the days when they were young and strong, on the  average, and are much less likely to grab a barbell and get the heck to work to be stronger tomorrow than they are today.

Women who test themselves against CrossFit find transformation, just as many men do, but the reach is farther - the anecdotes about how their CrossFit changed their relationships at work, for example, abound.  Why?  I'm just guessing but I think it teaches anyone how to face fear and do what needs to be done.

The term used in the quote above - heavy weights - is a pretty good example of a lady's mis-perception - what is heavy today is light tomorrow for the lady who gives herself to a real strength and conditioning program.

Fever Saves Lives

"Take fever as an example. For 150 years, doctors have routinely prescribed antipyretics like ibuprofen to help reduce fever. But in 2005, researchers at the University of Miami, Florida, ran a study of 82 intensive care patients. The patients were randomly assigned to receive antipyretics either if their temperature rose beyond 101.3°F ("standard treatment") or only if their temperature reached 104°F. As the trial progressed, seven people getting the standard treatment died, while there was only one death in the group of patients allowed to have a higher fever. At this point, the trial was stopped because the team felt it would be unethical to allow any more patients to get the standard treatment.

"So when something as basic as fever reduction is a hallmark of the "practice of medicine" and hasn't been challenged for 100+ years, we have to ask: What else might be practiced due to tradition rather than science?"
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/12/04/technology-doctors-khosla/

Other issues that science will eventually shed light on include:
The effect of fat on health, the impact on health of wheat and other dense carbs, the positive impact of sunlight and vitamin D even relative to the damage from sunlight, and what type of vitamin supplementation strategies are effective optimize health, vice just eliminating critical deficiencies.

True, But Irrelevant

"Whether anyone likes to admit it or not, for sheer weight loss, it [macronutrient composition of the diet] probably doesn't. It is the total amount of energy consumed (calories) that matters. And this is not an arguable point. There is this pesky little physical law of the universe that forms the basis of all weight loss and weight gain. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed but is always conserved. In other words, energy that enters a system will necessarily equal the energy that remains in the system or leaves the system. Food, as far as the body is concerned, is merely a form of energy, and the amount of calories you take in (eat and drink) must equal the amount of calories stored in the body or expended through metabolism. Nowhere in this inalterable equation is the quality of the diet or composition of the diet a consideration, only the math of caloric deficit or surplus. It's old, but the phrase "calories count" is still as viable today as it was when the first diet hucksters tried to cash in on the vain American obsession with skinniness. So, according to the law of energy conservation, if you eat according to the food pyramid and keep the numbers of calories you eat to less than you expend, you can lose weight. If you go low-fat and low-calorie, you can eat and drink nothing but Choco Cap'n Crunch and Coke in appropriate quantities and you can lose weight. If you go low-carbohydrate, you can eat and drink nothing but bacon and diet Coke in appropriate quantities and you can lose weight. If you go low-protein, you probably can't think clearly enough to comprehend this, but, believe me, the same energetic relationships apply."
http://community.crossfit.com/article/physics-physiology-and-food

However, all of what was just written, as regards fat loss from dieting by "humans in the wild", is true, but irrelevant.  Thus, though his intro sound like a condemnation of low carb diets (better described as diets free of excessive carbohydrate), read on:

"The low-fat diet presumes, quite correctly, that since fat is a very  energy-dense macronutrient at nine calories (kilocalories, to be  precise, but we'll just call them calories, per popular use) per gram,  reducing how much fat you eat will reduce your caloric intake  significantly. The average American gets somewhere around 34 percent of  total dietary calories from fats in food. Reducing this intake to 20  percent would be enough of a caloric reduction for someone to lose about  a pound a week-if the calories were not replaced with carbohydrate or  protein. (Though, even replacing them on a gram-for-gram basis would  likely net a weight loss of about a pound every ten days or so, since  both carbohydrate and protein contain 4 calories per gram.) If you can  hang with the food choices of the low-fat diet, you can effectively lose  weight.    For a chance at success with a low-fat diet, not only do you need to  change the foods you eat, you also need to change how you eat. Instead  of three squares a day, it is much more effective to eat four or five  smaller meals with little snacks between. Spreading the food relatively  uniformly across the waking day helps minimize the time between insulin  concentration troughs, thereby helping limit between-meal hunger pangs.  

"It is interesting to note that, in the last decade, the  government-sponsored campaign against dietary fat has resulted in a  decrease in the percent of fat in the American diet (it peaked out at  over 42 percent a few years ago). But, over the same time, the average  bodyweight and body fat of the average citizen has increased despite the  decrease in dietary fat. Oops.    

"How is this true for carb restricted diets?  The highly touted low-carbohydrate diet has some quite clever elements  that are biologically effective and promotionally effective. "Eat as  much protein and fat as you like" is one element that almost every one  of its practitioners loves. "Wait, I'm on a diet and I can eat as much  as I want? Sign me up!" Despite its outward appearance, though, a  low-carbohydrate diet is not a high-calorie diet. Two interesting things  will initially prevent over-consumption of calories. First, fat is a  very satisfying macronutrient. A protein- and fat-rich meal will satisfy  hunger more effectively than a high-carbohydrate meal. Second, severely  limiting carbohydrate consumption limits insulin secretion, and the  dieter will not experience the swings in blood glucose seen in the  low-fat diet. With a more consistent level of blood sugar throughout the  day, the low-carbohydrate dieter will experience fewer hunger pangs (and  mood and energy swings). Less perceived hunger results in a  self-selected reduction in calories consumed. So eating "as much as you  want" actually turns out to be less than you normally would eat with a  typical American pattern of eating lots of carbohydrates along with your  fats and proteins. There is a misconception out there that  low-carbohydrate diets drop your body fat faster and to a greater  magnitude than low-fat diets. You do lose "weight" very quickly in the  early stages of the low-carbohydrate diet. This is because the body  mobilizes and uses its existing carbohydrate stores (i.e., glycogen and  glucose) when you stop consuming them in your meals. That elimination of  stored carbohydrate carries with it an elimination of water weight as  well. Any time carbohydrate is stored in a cell, it is stored in  conjunction with water. Get rid of the carbohydrate and you will also  get rid of the water. The end result is a rapid loss of bodyweight that  is composed mostly of stored sugars and water and minimally of fat. But  that loss of carbohydrate and water is fast enough and large enough for  most dieters to perceive a difference in the mirror and on the scales.  Success makes you feel good and contributes to staying on the diet  longer. Once the initial carbohydrate losses have petered out, the body will then begin to tap into stored fat and the rate of fat loss will  increase and be similar in rate and magnitude to that seen in a successful long-term low-fat diet."

I just want to say - I violently agree with Dr. Kilgore, and would add that, as regards health, the water weight loss is as important as the fat loss.

Training Fasted?

The author makes a reasoned argument in support of his advocacy that one
should never train fasted:
http://www.crossfitinvictus.com/must-read-posts/training-on-an-empty-sto
mach/

But others, notably Martin Berkhan and Art Devanny, have pointed to studies that show a benefit for fasted training.    What gives?    

Probably, what gives is that science on humans is notoriously hard to do well - perhaps impossible to do well, given the variables.    So - how could you decide for yourself what's best?    

Try it. 

If you are eating a protein adequate diet, and a carb adequate  diet, there's no reason you could not perform a CrossFit WOD, or even a  moderate endurance training event, while fasted.  I do this almost every day. 

If you are an elite competitor in CrossFit or any sport, that may not be  your best choice - but I'll bet there are some that do it.  The far larger issue is how to hydrate in the AM before an AM workout (or how to know if you are hydrating adequately all day long). You lose a considerable amount of water in your sleep through urine and water vapor from the lungs. You can absorb in the range of a quart of  water per hour. Water has to warm to body temperature before it will  pass into the blood stream through the gut. So, for AM training, drink warm water (the closer to body temp the better) with a pinch of salt,  potassium and magnesium, as close to a quart as you can, and as soon  after waking as you can, to allow time for absorption pre-workout. 

Working Out and Eating - Keep It Simple

The link that follows will take you to a slightly obtuse, but useful article about pre and post workout nutrition strategies.  My truth is - there's no truth right now.
http://crossfitcharlottesville.com/2011/04/07/pre-and-post-workout-nutrition-strategies/

You can find folks who will cite study after study about the critical and essential practice of "X, Y, and Z", and you can also find folks who don't do "X, Y or Z" and they rock the house.

Case in point - Rich Fronning, the fittest human on the planet, supposedly eat PB&J all day.  There's not a scientific study on the planet that would back that approach.

We just don't know the best approach, which is why results seen amongst athletes are highly individualized.

What I tell folks who want fat loss and fitness gain is - forget the post workout shake.  Eat real food, do not eat any food that zaps your blood sugars into the stratosphere, and train hard.  Competitive athletes, training to levels that are likely not healthy, will have to eat differently in most cases than blue collar athletes like you and me, who train to live (vice living to train).

Taubes in Mother Jones

Gary Taubes' article, Sweet Little Lies, was published in Mother Jones this month. The tag line is "The 40-year campaign to cover up evidence that sugar kills."

It starts:
"On a brisk spring Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvil award for excellence in "the forging of public opinion." The trade group had recently pulled off one of the greatest turnarounds in PR history. For nearly a decade, the sugar industry had been buffeted by crisis after crisis as the media and the public soured on sugar and scientists began to view it as a likely cause of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Industry ads claiming that eating sugar helped you lose weight had been called out by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration had launched a review of whether sugar was even safe to eat. Consumption had declined 12 percent in just two years, and producers could see where that trend might lead. As John "JW" Tatem Jr. and Jack O'Connell Jr., the Sugar Association's president and director of public relations, posed that day with their trophies, their smiles only hinted at the coup they'd just pulled off."

The cover benefits from an image of a pitcher of what looks like "Kool Aid" (aka colored, flavored sugar water), modified to resemble a mélange of a skull and an apologetic smile. You can see this photo here:
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/10/sugar-industry-lies-campaign

The article essentially says that there has been evidence of the health risks caused by excess sugar intake (type 2 diabetes leading to cancer, neurological disorders, and cardiovascular disease), but the industry, fearful of government regulation, used information suppression and distortion to prevent widespread discussion of these topics, preventing both regulation of the industry and execution of more definitive research.

A favorite tactic was to place folks "in the industry's pocket" as members of government panels looking into the subject. As a result, these government panels were pretty consistent in saying, essentially, "sugar's no problem." Folks, even a politician could figure out that 142 pounds of sugar (average annual consumption in the US) is not a good thing for health.

What does an industry mis-information campaign look like?
http://www.motherjones.com/slideshows/2012/10/classic-sugar-ads/eat-sugar-lose-weight

When questioned about the similarities of this case to the tobacco case, Taubes responds:
"There's a fundamental difference here that I will think change the way this plays out. With tobacco, the evidence was damning and, as I understand it, the tobacco industry tried to cover it up and make it go away. With sugar, the evidence was suggestive and the sugar industry just tried to make sure that the research to either exonerate sugar or convict it would never be done. They also worked and still work to assure that no consensus will ever be achieved. So ethically it's a different issue and it is legally as well. But now I'm stepping outside what little expertise I arguably have."

One thing that puzzles me is why the sugar industry so outperformed the beef industry in this public opinion battle. Was the beef industry so confident in its product that it felt it did not have to muzzle the government's mis-information about animal fats/saturated fats? Or, was the beef industry more dispersed and less amenable to effective representation by an industry lobby group? Perhaps they did everything they could but I just don't know about it. The irony is that the beef industry had science on its side all along, and the government sided with sugar instead. "Go figure."

How did the industry's distortions play out in real life? Here's an illustrative anecdote:
"But after flipping through The Stop & Go Fast Food Nutrition Guide, the book that healthy-living guru Steven G. Aldana had handed out at the conclusion of his talk, my fight or flight response kicked in. Aldana was on his way to the airport, and I had a question for him.

"I caught him halfway up the stairs leading to the street. "How can you say sweet tea is good for you?" I blurted out, less eloquently than I had intended. Aldana's book had given Lipton Brisk-which contains 11 teaspoons of sugars per 16-ounce can-his "You're eating healthy!" seal of approval. Earlier in my career, working as a dental director for low-income clinics in Denver, I had seen firsthand the damage these kinds of sugary drinks incur on people's teeth-never mind the causative role they may play in chronic diseases such as diabetes and obesity.

"Perched three steps above me, Aldana looked down calmly. "There is no research to support that sugar causes chronic disease," he said. Then, before I could string another sentence together, he was out the door."
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/10/former-dentist-sugar-industry-lies

NOTE: Here begins the libertarian editorial, feel free to skip this is you are emotionally invested in the competence and goodness of an expansive federal government.

The USDA's credibility is right up there with the rest of our "incredible" government, from fraud laden and astonishingly unsustainable Medicare, to bankrupt (and also fraudulent) social security, to the sham debate about the "fiscal cliff".   Finding out the USDA was used as a tool of industry isn't really a surprise, but it is nonetheless tragic since so many have suffered as a result (next big expose will be of all the ways the pharmaceutical industry leverages government stooges to peddle drugs which have been significantly misrepresented with regards to efficacy).

 Our government prescribes a dietary approach that makes people sick when they are old, and then spends "a mint" to keep them alive, meaning social security won't have enough funding to keep paying them. If it wasn't real, you would not believe it could be true.

Taubes: Thought Experiment

“If this effect is tiny, say, five calories worth of fat get trapped in A's fat cells every day, he'll still put on ten pounds of fat over the 20 years of the experiment and weigh 10 pounds more than his genetically-identical brother eating his almost identical diet. If this fat-trapping amounts to 20 calories a day - still less than one percent of the calories A is consuming - that would amount to forty pounds of excess fat over the course of the experiment. It would still be too subtle of an effect to be observable in the relatively short-term experiments done to date on sucrose consumption.”

http://garytaubes.com/2012/11/what-would-happen-if-thoughts-and-thought-experiments-on-the-calorie-issue/ - comment-19997

In other words, if you miss the calorie estimate by any amount, you'll be obese.  What's the solution?  Don't pretend the human conscious mind was built to control the human animal's intake.  No animal needs conscious intervention to avoid obesity WHEN IT EATS THE FOOD IT EVOLVED TO EAT, the human animal included.  

Why some eggs heads decided we should eat wheat and industrial seed oils, while avoiding the most natural human food on the planet - saturated animal fats - is beyond description.

Eat meat, eggs, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, no sugar no wheat.